Chapter 3
FARMHAND
EIGHT YEARS EARLIER
Last week of March, end of the wet season.
The gravel car park at the pub had flooded on one side.
Nev parked there anyway. Inside, not too many people yet, a small crowd of regulars at the bar.
No live music. If there was, she would be it.
She hadn’t brought her guitar or fiddle tonight. She hung her wet barn coat on the wall.
The barmaid who was the owner’s daughter poured Nev a schooner: amber liquid, nectar of the gods, foam on top the color of teeth and eyes.
Nev felt the question in the woman as soon as she sat down at the bar.
Debbie Collins—pretty, middle-aged, smelled like jasmine.
Nev had tried when she was twenty and Debbie was twenty-three, had been shot down, no hard feelings.
Not a large dating pool in Lionheart: big families, everyone related, people stuck around.
“Nev Darlin’,” Debbie said. “Looking for another hand on the farm?”
“That depends. Who’ve you got?” Nev asked.
“Reg Madonna’s looking for work for his girl.”
Nev sipped her Carlton Mid. That name again. Debbie’s mother, Peggy, who in addition to owning the pub also answered the phone for the Lionheart police department, had helped Nev figure out the intruder’s name two years ago.
Ronnie Peterson. Only girl in town who looked like that. Reg Madonna’s baby mama’s other child. Had the mother’s last name but not the mother.
Pregnant kid with the cricket bat out on parole. Who was she without the baby and the bat?
“Oh?” Nev’s breath slowed and her palms began to sweat.
She had resisted the urge to follow up on the kid after the break-in.
It had taken her a year to finish putting the family room back together, and by then there was no family left to live in it.
Her parents’ rapid decline had taken precedence over home renovation.
She hadn’t asked Peggy at the station for gossip.
The paper had printed the details of the domestic violence trial and name of the victim—Maude—over eighteen. Unusual case.
Juvenile sentencing was strange. Four years sounded like a long time and yet not a long time for attempted murder. Two years inside, two on parole.
“Why isn’t she looking herself?” Nev asked.
“You’ll understand when you see her. Not a lot of prospects in town.”
“She should be in school.” Knee-jerk reaction. Manual labor’s a bleak future. It gets old fast, like the people who do it.
Debbie shook her head. That was one thing Nev hated about this place, the casual disregard of higher education as a means to a better life.
That rural mentality translated into a general lack of ambition.
But who was she to judge? She hadn’t done anything to write home about since ‘94. Managing a thousand sheep bound for slaughter wasn’t glamourous jet-setting or saving the world.
Now that her parents were both gone—step-mother dead of an aneurism two years ago, her father of heart failure two months later—she wouldn’t know where to send that letter anyway.
“Bad kid, could be a hard worker,” Debbie said.
“The Madonnas are a tight bunch; she’ll straighten out.
The family’s protective. My cousin’s her probation officer.
To talk to her he has to talk to all of them.
” You couldn’t throw a stone around here without hitting a Madonna or a Collins.
There were black Madonnas and white Madonnas, same as the Collinses.
Nev’s people, the Bickermans, had only been here four generations, not enough time to spread out.
She considered herself the only child of an only child of an only child.
The last one. They waited too long to have kids in her family.
At thirty-eight, she was turning out to be no exception, but her dad had guilted her into freezing her eggs before he died.
Small price to pay for the peace of mind of a dying man.
“You must know Reg?” Debbie said.
“Not personally. Should I?” His name came up in the local rag sometimes for his intercultural advocacy work and his conservation efforts.
He was on the board of directors of the tree-planting nonprofit that was always sending her passive-aggressive emails offering to replant trees along the creek in her sheep paddocks.
“He spent the last two years protesting in his camper outside the Youth Detention Centre down near Brissie,” Debbie said, squinting. “They just elected him Chief of the volunteer fire department. He’s a mover and a shaker. Grass doesn’t grow on him.”
High praise. Nev wondered what the kid looked like now.
“Tell him to send her around tomorrow.” She could find something for the kid to do.
She wasn’t worried about the girl’s temper.
Even a good dog will bite if backed into a corner.
She was concerned that the girl might be a drug addict.
Nev didn’t deal with addicts, as a rule, couldn’t hack it, like talking to a potted plant.
Nev finished her Carlton Mid, slid the empty glass across the bar.
What was in it for Debbie Collins, to help the girl?
What favor did the bartender need from Reg Madonna?
Maybe nothing. Nev was paranoid, jaded from living elsewhere for too long.
People here didn’t think that way. They were nice to each other for no reason.
Karma was a close-woven basket here. It didn’t take long to reap what you sowed.
The next morning a dual cab black truck pulled down the drive, parked in front of the barn—what Nev would call a ute if it was used for farm work. This truck had never been used hard, looked pristine. Three people got out.
Nev shook hands with Reg Madonna. She recognized him from community events. Good-looking man—stocky, tanned, with warm brown eyes and short black hair.
Reg was around her age, maybe a little younger.
He had grown up here; she hadn’t. Nev had moved to Christchurch, New Zealand, after her mother left her father when Nev was two.
Nev’s grandparents with tin-mining money had lived out in Ravenshoe, highest town in Queensland with Queensland’s highest pub, in a different social strata than the Madonnas and Collinses.
“G’day, Madonna. Welcome to Upsend Downs.”
“G’day, Bickerman. Appreciate your time. Gorgeous spread you got here. This all your place?”
“It belonged to my parents,” Nev said, self-conscious of the wide view of the horizon from her front lawn.
Upsend Downs looked like a rich person’s estate, but was a working farm, and she was rationing her inheritance to keep it afloat one year to the next.
“I came out here to shuffle the papers before they died, got trapped in the wheel.”
“I don’t believe it for a second,” Reg said. He swiveled, admiring the view again. “My nan had a dairy farm out here somewhere.”
“This was part of it. My dad bought this block in eighty from the bloke who bought your grandmother’s farm in sixty-five.”
Reg smiled behind dark sunglasses. “Small world. You look familiar.”
Nev forced herself not to glance back at the girl. “Want a tour?”
Reg shook his head. “Another time. You’re all right.” He turned to his adult kids. “This was part of your nan’s dairy farm.” Reg turned to Nev. “My father passed away in July.”
“My condolences. Mine passed away last year also.”
“Sucks, doesn’t it? Was that the original house?” Reg asked, gesturing to Stone House behind her.
Nev shook her head. “Your grandparents’ homestead was down where lake Tinaroo is now.
On the left-hand side, see the dead trees?
That’s where the homestead was, toward Kulara.
Your grandparents moved the original farmhouse up to Boar Pocket Road in the fifties, but it burned down before we got here.
Lightning. Wraparound veranda, ten bedrooms.”
“Families were bigger then,” Reg said. He eyed her thoughtfully, then turned to his kids. Nev heard him whisper to the young woman. “Don’t be a dick to her. She’s had hard luck.”
Nev blushed. Even before Rwanda she had been a semi-tragic figure in town. She was the type of well-behaved person mothers wanted to take care of. She gestured behind Reg. “These your kids?”
Two young people behind Reg towered over him. He chuckled. “Their mum is a giant. They’re both my kids.” He introduced them. Mattie, young man in his early twenties, looked like Reg. Ron, the young woman in her late teens, did not.
Nev laughed. The scrawny girl who had done the sloppy B&E had gone the way of all things.
The woman behind Reg had a large tattoo up the side of her neck that said KITTEN in graffiti letters, had gained half her body weight in muscle and grown a hand taller.
Funny how juvie took scared kids and turned them into hardened criminals.
She looked to be in her mid-twenties, but had to be younger.
“What have they been feeding you in that place? Fertilizer?”
The young woman wearing sunglasses like her brother and stepdad uncrossed her arms to shake Nev’s hand and had a grip like a basketball player. Christ, she was tall. She hadn’t seemed so tall before, but then, it had been dark.
“You don’t want to know. Sorry to hear about your parents.”
“Thanks. Old age gets us all in the end, if we’re lucky.”
Reg looked from one to the other, then back again. “You two know each other?”
Nev grinned. “Never seen her a day in my life.” It had been nighttime.
“Sorry again about that,” the young woman said.
“No worries.”
“I’m afraid to ask,” Reg said. “Mattie here is going to stay with her the first week. I assume you’ll give her a test run. If it isn’t a good fit, no worries. No harm in trying.”
Nev addressed the younger man. “Keen to work, too? Plenty needs doing. I’ll pay you.”
Reg left in the black truck.
Nev and the Madonna siblings, half-siblings by the look of it, walked toward the horse barn. She addressed the young woman. “What do you want to be called?”
“Ron.” Long vowel, rhymed with gone. Odd name for a girl.